Ed Miliband united with long-lost relative on Moscow phone-in show

Ed Miliband, the Labour minister, has been reunited with a long-lost relative
in Russia after she called in to a radio phone-in show he appeared on during
a visit to Moscow.

Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy.Photo: PA

By Andrew Osborn in Moscow

7:22PM BST 07 Oct 2009

The secretary of state for energy was contacted by Sofia Davidovna Miliband, 87, as he answered questions on climate change.

She was initially cut off by programme makers who thought she was a hoaxer but the pair later met and she was able to give him details of his family’s suffering at the hands of the Nazis.

The chance discovery will help him and his brother David, the foreign secretary, learn more about their late father’s Polish Jewish side of the family.

Samuel, the brothers’ grandfather, and Ralph, their father, fled to England at the start of the Second World War but many other family members were stranded in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Mrs Miliband, a historian and Middle East expert, rang the program and announced she was the brothers’ only living relative in Russia and wanted to tell Mr Miliband about his family’s past.

“My name is Sofia Davidovna Miliband,” she told the talk show host who cut her off quickly.

But Mr Miliband later visited the woman in her Moscow flat, keeping guests at an embassy reception waiting to catch up with his family history.

The discovery is so new that both sides are still struggling to work out how exactly they are related. Mr Miliband believes that his great-great grandfather was the brother of Sofia’s grandfather.

“The minister was understandably surprised and delighted to meet his long-lost relative,” a spokesman for the British Embassy said. Yet that pleasure was likely to be tinged with sadness.

Mrs Miliband, explained how she had told the minister how two men thought to be Mr Miliband’s great uncles committed suicide in order to escape the Nazi concentration camps, while a third was killed during the Nazi invasion of Poland. One of the men, Mikheil, killed himself by swallowing a dose of poison while boarding a train he learned was bound for Auschwitz or Dachau. A second relative, Osip, gassed himself and his wife using the kitchen stove, and a third relative, Stefan, was killed by German troops.

“I told him all I knew,” said Sofia. “And he told me all he knew.” She said David Miliband is expected to drop in for tea when he visits Russia next month. The Milibands’ family history has caused controversy in Russia in the past with a top Kremlin spin doctor accusing the foreign secretary of being anti-Russian because of his grandfather’s Polish-Jewish roots.